AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...

KDE launched Plasma in 2005 to revitalize the desktop interface, which the project said had remained "essentially the same" as it was in 1984. The initiative sought to renovate the KDE desktop codebase for the upcoming KDE 4 release, as well as to make innovations to KDE 3's conservative interface.

KDE keeps the desktop relevant and powerful as it doesn’t force an interface designed for phones or tablets on desktop users. KDE offers different GUI environments for different form factores. There is Plasma Desktop for desktop computers,Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and "Plasma Active" for smartphones and tablets. So a desktop or tablet user doesn’t have to make any compromise.

The latest series of the K Desktop Environment now utilizes Plasma, a new desktop and panel user interface tool that aims for a more functional, user-friendly, and sleek KDE desktop. Plasma also supports Dashboard-like widgets called plasmoids.If you want to further enhance the look of your KDE 4 desktop, I have here a list of some of the most beautiful Plasma themes available:

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

Last week, the third Plasma developers meeting was held in the Swiss Alps. 15 developers from 3 continents came to Randa, Canton Wallis to work on Plasma's code, design new ideas and concepts and to strengthen their bonds as a sub-community within KDE.

The latest K Desktop Environment, KDE, features two modes of interacting with the desktop – the classic Desktop interface and the Netbook interface. On recent KDE-based distributions that I have reviewed for this website, the default is the classic Desktop, but switching to the Netbook interface is an easy, few seconds process.

Plasma itself is designed from the ground up to take KDE into places where it has not been really very appropriately shaped for in the past. KDE is also bringing new ways of interacting with user interface components, some of which are still in their infancy. The desktop is just one possible implementation use.

While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you’ll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture.

A new Plasma-based custom KDE desktop shell is designed to deliver a better user experience on netbooks and other devices with small screens. Ars takes a look at the prototype to see how it compares to the conventional KDE desktop environment.